Excerpt
The eggs had reached maturity. With the ensuing hormone spike, Winnibozho woke up on the bottom of the lake, buried in the deep, mineral-rich silt where she had been lost in ‘dreamtime’ for days. The copper base in her blood called her to seek out the rich copper-bearing areas required for her eggs to be properly fertilized. The waterborne traces of copper ions led her to the well, and down that to the small cave leading to the lower caverns beneath the system of lakes that dot Wisconsin and many of the northern Midwest states, the caves where the males of her species lived in perpetual darkness pursuing blind fish and resting in huge air caverns.
Before all of her length had passed into the cave proper, she reached a barrier of collapsed stones. Battering the collapse with her head, futilely seeking a path through, she remembered doing the same thing many years before during her last breeding cycle. Rearing back, she caught a scale on the cave wall, and with a sharp pain it popped loose, drifting to the cave floor. Usually, she would consume the scale to replenish the nutrients from which it was made, but in her hormone-driven rage, she barely noticed it. Frustrated, and feeling the eggs inside her shifting and hormonally crying out to be fertilized, she bashed once more at the stones. Realizing the futility, she turned, not an easy thing for a reptile over forty feet long and three feet in diameter, in the small cave, and plunged back out into the lake proper. Letting out a mournful warbling cry that echoed throughout the lake system, she received no response.
In his home built of native stone resting on bedrock by the lakeshore, Nathanial Lincoln woke from the light sleep of the aged, and wondered what had called him from his dreams. He listened as the neighbor’s dogs started whining and barking, as if something had disturbed their rest as well…